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With early voting coming to a close Saturday and Election Day looming, local parties are making their final pushes to get voters to the polls.

Most successful in the ground game in three of the mountains' biggest counties have been Buncombe County Democrats with 50 percent of registered party members — or 39,068 voters — turning out to cast ballots as of 9:30 a.m. Friday.

"We have a lot of experience on our side," said Buncombe Democratic Chair Kathy Sinclair. "We started the day after the 2014 election. We plan. This is strategic."

Republicans also hit the polls early with 20,211 in Buncombe or 43 percent of registered party members. In Henderson County, 45 percent or 14,139 had voted as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

GOP voters though traditionally show their numbers on Election Day as they did statewide in 2012, when they surged ahead of a Democratic lead in early voting to hand Republican Mitt Romney North Carolina's 15 electoral votes.

That happened this year in Henderson's June primary, said county Republican chair Glen Englram.

"When early voting was over our percentages were off, compared to what we saw on the Democrat side. Once the election happened June 7, that changed dramatically," Englram said.

In Haywood County, Democrats so far have shown the most interest with 40 percent or 7,028 voting early as of 5 p.m. Thursday.

In terms of overall turnout, Buncombe has pushed out votes more than most of the state's 100 counties. An early ballot count of more than 86,000 means a 20 percent increase in Buncombe early voting compared to 2012.

Democrats have relied on a "no-precinct-left-behind" strategy said Sinclair. That means even highly conservative regions of the county will get their attention, the county Democratic chair said.

The battles fought in the counties can have stunning consequences in a state teetering between a Democratic and Republican presidential win. Late Friday afternoon, two sites that analyze polls put the race as a toss up with a slight edge to Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Real Clear Politics showed Trump up by 1 percent and FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 51.5 percent chance of winning to Clinton's 48.5 percent.

Statewide, Democrats lead in early voting turnout, but they have cast the same number of ballots as in 2012, according to Catawba College political scientist Mike Bitzer. Republicans are behind Democrats but are 13 percent ahead of where they were four years ago.

A growing wild card is unaffiliated voters, though some analysts say they tend to come from urban areas and therefore lean Democratic. Across North Carolina, there are still fewer unaffiliated early voters than Democrats or Republicans, but their numbers have grown by 43 percent since the last presidential election, according to numbers from Bitzer.

In Buncombe and Haywood they outnumber registered Republicans, though unaffiliated voters have turned out in smaller numbers than registered GOP voters so far.

In Henderson voters registered as unaflliated have outnumbered Democrats and recently surpassed Republicans in that conservative stronghold. In terms of actual ballots cast, though, unaffiliated voters are at 12,077, about 2,000 fewer than Republicans.

Englram called unaffiliated growth "a phenomenon that’s been going on a couple of years." The Henderson GOP chairman attributed it to people not wanting to be called on the phone by the party, frustration with the party system and an influx of people who were registered independent in other states.